Southern African countries plan single visa

South African Tourism Minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, about his dream of making an African e-visa regime a reality.

At the tip of the African continent, South Africa is a long way from most of the rest of the world, and it is, therefore, not really surprising that it does not function as a major regional hub.

But Tourism Minister, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, wants to change that by encouraging carriers to look on Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport as the key “south–south” hub for the southern hemisphere, linking up the rest of Africa, South America and parts of Asia and Australia.

What is more, Minister van Schalkwyk has a big idea to encourage a leap forward in tourism volumes in South Africa and its neighbours – a pan- African e-visa.

If he can bring about a common e-visa area for southern Africa, the increased flows through Johannesburg could make the hub idea more viable. The country has increased in popularity as a tourism destination since the end of apartheid.

In 2011, according to Statistics South Africa, it received some 3 million foreign visitors arriving by air, mainly at OR Tambo, with a peak in December and January.

The most common points of origin for foreign visitors were the UK (420,483), followed by the US (287,614) and Germany (235,774).

No surprises there perhaps, but in seventh place was India on 90,367, followed by China with 84,862 arrivals, which suggests South Africa can expect more as those economies grow.

Of total visitors, 94.3% came as tourists, with business journeys accounting for only 2.2% of traffic, and transit passengers and students making up the remainder.

Traffic is dominated by resident carrier South African Airways (SAA) and to a lesser extent by its low-cost subsidiary Mango, followed by carriers such as British Airways.

But what South Africa and southern Africa continues to lack is a central hub for intra-regional travel, to foster tourism and business between the African states bordering South Africa, and van Schalkwyk hopes e-visas and the hub idea may break down this barrier.

His objective is to get rid of much of the bureaucratic hassle of travelling in southern Africa by having a common travel region for all its countries – rather like the European Union’s Schengen agreement. Van Schalkwyk says agreement is near on this becoming a reality.

First the good news. Van Schalkwyk, who has been Tourism Minister since 2004, says more than 50 carriers now fly to South Africa, against only 26 in the late 1990s, and that while “obviously a nation such as ours is a long-haul destination from almost everywhere in the world”, a managed liberalisation process has attracted airlines.

“It may sound an old-style philosophy, but we believe that more competition will drive down prices and provide more choices, which are good for a destination,” he tells Routes News.

Tourist arrivals increased by 10.5% in the first six months of this year and South Africa attracts some 4.25 million tourists a year, including those arriving by land, he says.

Van Schalkwyk thinks southern Africa as a whole could attract more visitors than it does and that complex visa rules imposed by most countries are a deterrent to this if people wish to visit more than one country.

“We believe the world should move to e-visas, and at the G20 heads of state meeting in Mexico all of them committed themselves to travel facilitation, but not everybody is there exactly at this moment,” he explains.

Van Schalkwyk says the process of getting a single visa for the southern part of the continent agreed upon is “only two countries away from it, and if we can convince them we are there”, he says.